Consent of the Networked by Rebecca MacKinnon (Basic Books, £17.99)It's not just China, Syria and other authoritarian regimes that censor and spy on their citizens' internet activity; the greatest increase in such operations is occurring in western countries. This timely, scholarly survey of global offences against "freedom" on the internet also points out that Facebook, Google and the like supply "corporate" rather than "public" spaces, whose users are subject to the unsophisticated moral diktats of their owners.

MacKinnon gives a clear explanation of "net neutrality", addresses important issues of global cyber-governance, and relates some telling anecdotes. At the 2009 meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Egypt, the then president's wife, Suzanne Mubarak, made a long unscheduled speech to launch her "Cyber Peace Initiative" to promote "online child safety". MacKinnon pointed out to western NGOs hurrying to sign up that "child safety is commonly used by authoritarian regimes as an excuse for censorship and surveillance". Now that's out of the bag, I recommend future members of dictatorial families announce their new spying schemes as initiatives to promote happy internet kittens.

Generation Xbox: How Videogames Invaded Hollywood by Jamie Russell (Yellow Ant, £9.99)From Atari's Superman game in the 1970s to Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft and beyond, the relationship between films and videogames has been one of false starts, cul-de-sacs, envy and dramatic bitching. Russell's perky history uses the word "incredible" too much, but is a fascinatingly detailed account. It provides revealing analyses of failed revolutions, such as the laserdisc game Dragon's Lair (made by ex-Disney animators), and the genesis of modern globe-spanning genres: Steven Spielberg was heavily involved in the creation of the first Medal of Honor second-world-war shooter, hoping it would be educational.

The story is built around telling interviews with the people who made this oddball history, including the directors of the catastrophic Super Mario Bros film starring Bob Hoskins, and Paul WS Anderson, who made the rather good Mortal Kombat film and kickstarted the celluloid Resident Evil franchise of zombie mayhem. Rather severely, Russell calls these films "largely dross", but star Milla Jovovich's assessment seems more apropos: "Wet dress. Zombies. Guns. Cool!"

The Empire of Death by Paul Koudounaris (Thames & Hudson, £29.95)The Empire of Death could also work as a title for zombie mayhem, but the figures in this morbidly beautiful "cultural history of ossuaries and charnel houses" are mostly too fleshless to qualify as potential zombies: at best there are a few mummies (biding their time in monks' habits, or apparently splitting their sides laughing), while we get a lot of skeletons dressed up in jewelled finery, as well as people utterly deconstructed and turned into building materials: chapels of bones with skulls set like seashells into the wall.

As a coffee-table memento mori, this is a bit more affordable than a Damien Hirst skull, and more informative too. In a grim grand tour, the author has surveyed such macabre mises en scène throughout Europe, South America and east Asia. The thoughtful text muses on the sites as group memorials to fallen soldiers or disaster victims, as contested resting-places of the legendary dead, as the focus of local cults, as eldritch religious sculpture, or just as macabre entertainments. Some ossuaries were thought to contain souls stuck in purgatory; it's hard even now not to read those rows of staring eye-sockets as otherworldly surveillance.